§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising. In particular, the present invention concerns helping advertisers to manage advertising campaigns such as online advertising campaigns for example.
§1.2 Background Information
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.
Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Interactive advertising provides opportunities for advertisers to target their ads to a receptive audience. That is, targeted ads are more likely to be useful to end users since the ads may be relevant to a need inferred from some user activity (e.g., relevant to a user's search query to a search engine, relevant to content in a document requested by the user, etc.) Query keyword targeting has been used by search engines to deliver relevant ads. For example, the AdWords advertising system by Google of Mountain View, Calif., delivers ads targeted to keywords from search queries. Similarly, content targeted ad delivery systems have been proposed. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 10/314,427 (incorporated herein by reference and referred to as “the '427 application”) titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR SERVING RELEVANT ADVERTISEMENTS”, filed on Dec. 6, 2002 and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik and Paul Buchheit as inventors; and 10/375,900 (incorporated by reference and referred to as “the '900 application”) titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT,” filed on Feb. 26, 2003 and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Buchheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik, Deepak Jindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors, describe methods and apparatus for serving ads relevant to the content of a document, such as a Web page for example. Content targeted ad delivery systems, such as the AdSense advertising system by Google for example, have been used to serve ads on Web pages.
Regardless of whether or how ads are targeted, an advertiser typically compensates the content (e.g., Web page) owner (and perhaps an ad serving entity). Such compensation may occur whenever the ad is served (per impression), or may be subject to a condition precedent such as a selection, a conversion, etc. Compensation per selection (commonly referred to as “pay per click”) is currently becoming popular. Compensation may be determined from an offer (e.g., maximum offer, bid, etc.) associated with a targeting keyword and/or some other targeting criteria.
There are some advertisers that do not want to deal with bids, or at least not on an ongoing (e.g., daily) basis. For example, in the current AdWords system, the advertiser may need to specify numerous parameters to initiate an ad campaign or ad group. Such parameters may include, among other items, budget, keywords that the campaign is targeted to, serving constraints (also referred to as “targeting criteria”) such as the country, region, city or language to target, and a maximum offer per selection for each keyword. Unfortunately, specifying the appropriate parameters can be time-consuming. It is especially time consuming to specify and manage offers because this can be an on-going process. That is, at least for parameters such as budget, targeting keywords and audience constraints, most of the work is done at setup time, or during some periodic “optimization” or tuning of the targeting. Offers, on the other hand, are often adjusted on an ongoing basis, both because the number of possible bid combinations makes finding an optimal solution a trial-and-error process, and because of the dynamic nature of the AdWords auction.
Thus, it would be useful to manage keyword offers (e.g., bids), or offers associated with any serving constraint(s), on behalf of advertisers.